We’re speaking in millimetres here, but that measurement rise is something that happens on a yearly basis. If you take say, 50 years, that does mean quite a rise in surface area that the seas cover.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 said that by today, the seas should be rising at two millimetres every year.

But it appears they were wrong according to three scientists who reported their findings in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Their estimate is that the sea will rise just over three millimetres per year.

The IPCC’s information had been gathered between 1993 and 2003, and there had been new data available since then – which is what the scientists, led by Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) – based their research on.

The scientists also warned that their new assessment “may also be biased low,” for a number of reasons including the fact that meltwater from land ice continued to be an unknown factor when making accurate predictions about rising sea levels.

That would mean that seas would rise by about a metre by the turn of the century. That low lying home you have on the Knysna Lagoon’s Leisure Isle? You may not want your children to bequeath it to their children unless there are some Dubai-ish plans in place for raising your island.

Grant Foster of US firm Tempo Analytics told AFP:

I would say that a metre of sea level rise by the end of the century is probably close to what you would find if you polled the people who know best. In low-lying areas where you have massive numbers of people living within a metre of sea level, like Bangladesh, it means that the land that sustains their lives disappears, and you have hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and that can lead to resource wars and all kinds of conflicts. For major coastal cities like New York, probably the principal effect would be what we saw in Hurricane Sandy. Every time you get a major storm, you get a storm surge, and that causes a major risk of flooding. For New York and New Jersey, three more feet of water would be even more devastating, as you can imagine.

The IPCC would only be releasing its next compilation of data in September 2013, March 2014 and April 2014.

One thing the latest scientists did however agree with was the fact that the temperature rise prediction remained in line with previous estimates: 0,16 degrees Celsius per decade.

[Source: AFP]